Oscar Isaac and Ben Affleck star in a military and moral drama with gritty, convincing action. Critic's rating: 4 stars out of 5.

“Ocean’s Eleven” meets “Zero Dark Thirty” in the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier,” starring Oscar Isaac and Ben Affleck as special-forces veterans who decide to take their skill set private.

It’s a movie that maybe tries to do too much, but it does enough of it well to keep you glued to the screen.

It’s a heist flick, as Isaac’s Santiago “Pope” Garcia, a “consultant” for a South American country in its dirty war against a cocaine cartel, recruits four old Army buddies for an illegal mission to kill a kingpin and grab his cash.

But it also has a social agenda, highlighting issues of PTSD and economic insecurity for dedicated professionals who have taken more than one bullet for the red, white and blue. And when the supercrew — Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund and Pedro Pascal round out the lineup of lethal weapons — finds itself in more danger than it bargained for, the moral stakes rise to the level of political allegory.

The performances are strong, from Affleck’s quiet weariness to Hedlund’s brash bravado. Most of all, though, the movie delivers hair-trigger action that embeds the viewer in a convincing world with real-life superheroes and plenty of intrigue.

“Triple Frontier” originally was slated to be directed by “Zero Dark Thirty’s” Kathryn Bigelow, but she stepped back to producer status in favor of J.C. Chandor (“A Most Violent Year”), who also co-wrote the script. The movie’s shifts in tone may induce whiplash in some moviegoers, particularly if they’re invested in gung-ho patriotism.

Not that “Triple Frontier” is anti-patriotic. Not at all. Maybe the best scene in the film has musclebound prettyboy Hedlund singing a quiet dirge on a sun-soaked mountain: “Somewhere there’s a daughter / She’s crying for her dad / Dad was an airborne Ranger / Now he’s just a folded flag.”

The words are from an Army marching cadence, and it’s a moment that reflects how much the actors are themselves embedded in military culture. Just in the normal course of researching this kind of role, they spent hours with veterans hearing what it’s like to be in a firefight to what it’s like to come home to “normal” life afterward. The film’s sympathies are obviously with military families.

But even though we all “support the troops” these days, we are also not naïve about the fact that America’s wars, clandestine or otherwise, aren’t always as “clean” as we would like them to be. And it’s precisely the sympathy we feel for these characters that gives dramatic weight to the collateral damage that they eventually cause.

How much of it can they justify to themselves? And by extension, how much can we, the audience, justify to ourselves about the wars fought in our name?

“Triple Frontier” doesn’t quite reach John Le Carré depths of geopolitical sophistication, but it gives you a lot to talk about — after the adrenaline rush of a visceral screen experience fades away.